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In wake of Boston Marathon bombings, our 'security society' will only get tighter

Boston Marathon Explosion

Medical workers aid injured people at the 2013 Boston Marathon following an explosion in Boston, Monday, April 15, 2013. Two explosions shattered the euphoria of the Boston Marathon finish line on Monday, sending authorities out on the course to carry off the injured while the stragglers were rerouted away from the smoking site of the blasts. (AP Photo/The Boston Globe, David L Ryan)

Yesterday’s unspeakable events in Boston merely remind us of terror's high and ceaseless cost to us all.

More than 10 years removed from the 9/11 attacks, some of us seemed quicker to bridle at all the security measures that have become so engrained in our lives:

Going shoeless in the airport terminal. Full-body scans. TSA searches of people in wheelchairs and little kids that always seem to make it onto YouTube and Fox News. Pat downs to get into pro football games. And security lines, metal detectors and empty-your-pocket procedures at the entrance to every government building.

This is what it’s like when the next attack can come from anywhere. A world in which the unseen threat is as small and difficult to detect as a needle in a haystack, so the security dragnet must be tightened according. A society in which everyone is a suspect – until thoroughly searched and demonstrated otherwise.

It doesn’t feel all that good, does it? It wears on you. And it can make you resent all the inconveniences we now must suffer, while longing for all those little freedoms we’ve sacrificed along the way.

So much so, it can be tempting to want to turn back the clock. Especially after more than 10 years of relative safety following the most devastating day of attacks on the homeland in America’s history – Sept. 11, 2001.

Even the TSA seemed to retreat, announcing earlier this year that it would allow small pocket knives and wine bottle openers back onto planes.

Then, out of a blue April sky amid the cheers for later runners lumbering toward the finish line of the Boston marathon, comes the thunder of terror.

Two bombs in quick succession. Panic, chaos and causalities in every direction. Bloody sidewalks, death tolls and the familiar scene of a sober-faced president vowing justice to calm a nation.

The scale of this latest attack is a magnitude removed from Sept. 11. And we don't know yet the motive behind the bombings or the persons our groups responsible, be they foreign or domestic.

But the Boston bombings are unsettling in other ways.

Smuggling small bombs to where crowds gather now seems so easy, even amid our massive security society. A caustic mixture of BBs, ball-bearings and explosive managed to rock the finish line of a century-old institution, the Boston marathon.

It means anything’s a target. And when that becomes the mindset of America, we cede yet another portion of our identity as free people.

It’s all so sad. Not only because more security is coming -- it’s already been tightened around the globe in Boston’s wake. It’s that it now seems that there never can be enough security.

Not to prevent bombs like those that rocked Boston from slipping through – somewhere, sometime.

Now begins another effort to find the right balance between security and a free society. How much shall we spend in an era of across-the-board belt-tightening? The politicians on MSNBC's “Morning Joe” were already talking this morning about Homeland Security funding. More money for police departments across the country. Who could say no to that?

And I doubt many Americans will bristle the next time they are caught up in a security line. I know I won’t. Not while the images from Boston remain so fresh in America’s collective memory.

They often say that if we really knew the level of threat aimed at America, we’d be stunned into silence, and then spurred into action or sent cowering to our rabbit holes. Once viewing these secret threat assessments privy to only the highest reaches of government, the quick conclusion is that no amount of security is too much.

Just look at our gray-haired president, as he intoned those now-familiar words in wake of the bombings in Boston: “Make no mistake,” President Obama said. “We will get to the bottom of this. We will find out who did this and we will find out why… They will feel the full weight of justice.”

This is the same president who came to office vowing to close the military prison housing global terrorists at Guantanamo Bay and who won the Nobel Peace Prize for all that he would do to unite the world.

And then Obama got a look at those top secret threat assessments. Guantanamo remains open, and Obama doubled-down and then some on the use of drones to rain fire on the heads of suspected terrorists from the sky.

All this is just another example how terrorism – and even more insidiously, its constant, ubiquitous threat, changes everyone and everything.

Yesterday’s unspeakable events in Boston merely remind us of terror's high and ceaseless cost to us all.

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